“Momma are we! Are we going to marry Mr. Gallagher!”
“Zack, I’ve told you-”
“No no no no no. No Momma.”
Hazel resented it, Zack pretending to be a child. Childish. She knew, in his heart he was an adult like Hazel Jones.
“Zack, what is this ”we‘? There is no “we.” Only a man and a woman get married, nobody else. Don’t be silly.“
“I’m not silly. You’re silly.”
Zack was becoming wild, uncontrollable. Back home he would never have dared ask such questions. He was forbidden to speak familiarly about “Mr. Gallagher” who had come into their lives to change their lives as he was forbidden to speak familiarly about “Hazel Jones.”
As, in Malin Head Bay, a very long time ago now it seemed, he had been forbidden to ask about the pebbles vanishing one by one from the windowsill.
This snowy-glaring island called Grindstone in the choppy St. Lawrence River seemed to have unleashed, in Zack, a mutinous spirit. Already this morning he’d left their rooms and had been running on the stairs and skidding on carpets in the hallway and when Hazel had called him back he’d come reluctant as a bad-behaving dog. Now, restless, he was prowling about her room: poking in a step-in cedar closet, bouncing on the brass four-poster bed which Hazel had neatly made up as soon as she’d slipped from between the bedclothes. (No unmade or rumpled beds in any household in which Hazel Jones lived! It was the one thing that roused Hazel to something like moral indignation.) On the bureau was a carved antique clock with a glass face that opened: Zack was moving the black metallic hands around, and Hazel worried he might break them.
“You’re hungry, honey. I’ll make breakfast.”
She snatched his hands in hers. For a moment it seemed he might fight her, then he relented.
Unfamiliar surroundings made Zack nervous, antic. He’d badly wanted to come to Grindstone Island for the weekend, yet he was anxious about changes in the routine of his life. Hans Zimmerman had told Hazel that for the young pianist as gifted as her son, his life must revolve around the piano. Always Zack woke at the same time each morning, early. Always he practiced a half-hour at the piano before leaving for school. After school, he practiced no less than two hours and sometimes more, depending upon the difficulty of the lesson. If he struck a wrong note he made himself start a piece from the beginning: there could be no deviating from this ritual. Hazel could not interfere. If she tried to make him stop, to go to bed, he might lapse into a temper tantrum; his nerves were strung tight. Hazel had seen him seated at the piano with his small shoulders raised as if he were about to plunge into battle. She was proud of him, and anxious for him. She took comfort in hearing him practice piano for at such times she understood that both Hazel Jones and her son Zacharias were in the right place, they had been spared death on the Poor Farm Road for this.
“And you can play piano, honey. All you want.”
As Gallagher had promised, there was a piano downstairs in the lodge. The previous evening, Gallagher had played before supper, boisterous American popular songs and show tunes, and Zack had sat beside him on the piano bench. At first Zack had been shy, but Gallagher had drawn him into playing with him, jazzy companionable four-hand renditions of popular songs. And they’d played one of Zack’s Kabalevsky studies from the Pianoforte lesson book, boogie-woogie style that made Zack laugh wildly.
The piano was a matte-black baby grand, not in prime condition. It had not been tuned for years, and some of the keys stuck.
Gallagher said, “Music can be fun, kid. Not always serious. In the end, a piano is only a piano.”
Zack had looked mystified by the remark.
In the kitchen, Gallagher had helped Hazel prepare supper. They’d bought groceries together in Watertown, for the weekend. Hazel had asked him, “Is a piano only a piano?” and Gallagher had said, snorting, “Only a piano, darling! Sure as hell not a coffin.” Hazel had not liked this remark which was typical of Gallagher when he’d had a drink or two and was in his swaggering boisterous mood out of which his eyes, plaintive and accusing, adoring and resentful, swung onto her too emphatically. At such time Hazel stiffened and looked away, as if she had not seen.
I don’t know what your words mean. I am shocked by you, I will not hear you. Don’t touch me!
She could guess what it had been like, living with Gallagher as his former wife had done for eight years. He was the kindest of men and yet even his kindness could be engulfing, overbearing.
With some comical mishaps, and a good deal of eye-watering smoke, Gallagher started a birch-log fire in an immense cobblestone fireplace in the living room, and they ate on a small plank table in front of the fire; Zack had been very hungry, and had eaten too quickly, and nearly made himself sick. In the kitchen, he’d been upset by the tile floor: a black-and-white diamond pattern that made him dizzy, it seemed to be moving, writhing. In the living room, he’d been concerned that sparks from the fire would fly out onto the hook rug, and he’d been fascinated and appalled by the several mounted animal heads-black bear, lynx, buck with twelve-point antlers-on the lodge walls. Gallagher had told Zack to ignore the “trophies,” they were disgusting, but Zack had stared, silent. Especially, the buck’s head and antlers had drawn his attention for it was positioned over the fireplace and its marble eyes seemed unnaturally large, glassily ironic. The animal’s fur was a burnished brown, but appeared slightly matted, marred. A frail cobweb hung from the highest point of the antlers.
Hazel had taken the boy upstairs to bed shortly after nine o’clock though she doubted he would sleep, he was over-stimulated and hot-skinned, and had never before slept in a bunk bed.
Still, he’d insisted upon climbing the little ladder, to sleep in the top bunk. The thought of sleeping in the lower bunk seemed to frighten him.
Hazel had allowed him to keep a lamp burning beside the bed, and she’d promised not to shut the door between their rooms. If he woke agitated in the night, he would need to know where he was.
“Please be good, Zack! It’s a beautiful morning, and this is a beautiful place. We’ve never been in such a beautiful place, have we? It’s an island. It’s special. If you want to ”marry‘ Mr. Gallagher you would have to live with him in a house, wouldn’t you? This is like living with him, this weekend. This is his house, one of his family’s houses. He will be hurt if you aren’t good.“
She spoke as if to a very young child. There was the pretense between them, that Zack was a child.
Hazel rebuttoned his flannel shirt, he’d buttoned crookedly. She pulled a sweater over his head, and combed his hair. She kissed his warm forehead. So excited! Feeling the child’s pulses beat quick as her own.
Neither of them belonged here. But they had been invited, and they were here.
Hazel led Zack out of the room. The air in the hallway was rather drafty, with an acrid smoke-smell from the previous night.
Except for the wind, and a sound of ice melting, dripping from the eaves, and the harsh, intermittent cries of crows, the house was very still. The sky was scribbled in fine, faint clouds through which the sun shone powerfully. It would be one of those balmy-wintry days. Hazel gripped Zack’s hand to keep him from running along the corridor and a wild thought came to her that she and the child might enter Gallagher’s bedroom, which was close by: tease the sleep-dazed man awake, laugh at him. Gallagher was a man who loved to be teased and laughed at, to a degree. She and Zack could climb onto the bed in which Gallagher slept…
Instead they paused outside the door of his bedroom, to hear him snoring inside: a wet, gurgling sound labored as if the man were struggling uphill with an awkwardly shaped weight. It was somehow very funny that the snoring-snorting noises were not at all rhythmic, but uneven; there were pauses of several seconds, pure silence. Zack began laughing, and Hazel pressed her fingers over his mouth to muffle the sound. Then Hazel too began laughing, they had to hurry away.